CEO Blog: Putting the ‘Cognitive’ in Cognitive Computing: NLQ

‘Cognitive’ is everywhere these days. IBM Watson is pushing the concepts of Cognitive Computing from cancer research to cooking recipes. VPAs (virtual personal assistants) are gaining acceptance and adoption. Just look at the explosion behind Amazon’s Alexa. Every technology show I attend has a few vendors now showing their Alexa interface and sometimes it even works. We’re all talking at boxes and we expect those boxes to understand. iPhones, Androids, PlayStations, TV remotes, HeySiri, OKGoogle, etc.

However, there is a fundamental technology requirement to truly provide cognitive understanding of data. That requirement is built on a bulletproof AI/Natural Language engine that understands, first, the content of data. Now what does that a mean? It means the engine has indexed every possible term, concept and attribute within an application or database(s). It then understands the synonyms of the terms it has indexed. Furthermore, the engine truly understands the relationship between data. That is; tables, views, common join fields etc. providing a deep understanding of data.

Once you have that, you can then start to address how the engine will understand the context of a question. This is the NLQ piece of the puzzle. Natural Language Query: an excellent acronym for asking a question in English (or other language). So here’s the challenge. Ask a question, then get an answer. Sounds easy, damn hard, but completely transformative. Imagine enabling all of your mobile, professional users to simply speak their question and instantly receive the right answer.

It’s so hard, in fact, that very few business solutions can deliver on this promise today. Gartner has NLQ as the Critical Capability in many of it’s Magic Quadrants: Business Intelligence, Analytics, CRM, Data Sciences, Enterprise Search…however, when you take a look at all the technology providers in those Magic Quadrants, you’ll find only a couple that can even start to touch this.

It is, however, at the core of what EasyAsk is and how our engine was designed. Everything we do, whether it’s ecommerce search and merchandising, or providing the critical foundation for establishing your NLQ capability for Cognitive computing, we’re your partner. Just point us at your data and we do the rest. You’re probably trying to determine how to try and add this critical capability. We can show you how.